Corporations Need To Show Some Imagination On Nomenclature

June 8, 1985|By Russell Baker, New York Times

R.J. Reynolds, the cigarette company, is merging with Nabisco, a biscuit- and-crackers outfit. The obvious name for this new corporate monstrosity is Nabuttsco. I already have proposed it to the Committee on Nomenclature, whose couch, Burton B. Barton IV, assures me the suggestion will be given serious consideration.

This means it will be rejected out of hand, which is a pity. I expected better of a committee boss with the nerve to call himself a couch.

Most people who head committees nowadays call themselves chairs. You may not believe this unless you follow the kind of news that involves committees, which would make you a dull person indeed.

If you were that kind of person you would not be reading this. You would be reading the latest emissions from President Reagan about the tax bill being the greatest boon to humanity since penicillin. So believe me: If you were in charge of a committee these days, you would be called a chair.

Naturally, when I phoned the Committee on Nomenclature I asked to speak to the chair. ''We have no chair,'' said the telephone. ''Would you like to speak to the couch?''

A few years ago, suspecting that somebody was twitting me, I would have said, ''No, but I would like to leave a message for the escritoire.'' Not nowadays, though. Nowadays, if you said that, you would probably be connected to somebody introducing itself as ''the escritoire's settee.''

All right, having said that for lack of a chair I would speak to the couch, I was connected to the telephone of Burton B. Barton IV, who said that my suggestion for calling the huge new organism ''Nabuttsco'' would get serious consideration.

''I'm sorry to hear it,'' I said.

''Well, you know how it is: A lot of kids nowadays may not know that cigarettes used to be called butts, and it wouldn't help sales of either butts or biscuits if kids thought we were mired in the past.''

I did not point out that kids who didn't know butts were cigarettes certainly wouldn't know what mire was, so couldn't very well get sulky about it. It is useless to argue with corporate couches about the best way to exploit American youth.

In any case, I was interested in how this man liked being Burton B. Barton IV. Names, as you probably now realize, interest me. I like to see a thing or a person well named.

And people whose names included Roman numerals were once so enviable in my eyes that I despaired about not having one. Roman numerals meant class.

That was before Rocky movies took the gloss off Roman numerals. Until then the Roman numeral I always had wanted as part of my name was MCMXXXIV. This was because MCMXXXIV would be indecipherable to most people, if they are as bad at Roman numerals as I am, and this would have made me seem mysterious and romantic.

Burton B. Barton IV said, somewhat testily, that he did not intend to give up his IV, since nobody ever called him ''Rocky.'' It said something unflattering about him, I think, that he did not realize that the Roman numeral wasn't what it used to be. It explained why he was uninterested in renaming the new cigarette-and-crackers combine ''Nabuttsco.''

He typifies the unimaginative mentality that rules the nomenclatured committees of today's corporate world. Recently, for example, I notified General Electric that it was afflicted with a colorless name that gave little idea of what the company was up to.

Here was an outfit that had made billions out of Pentagon contracts, yet had paid no taxes for years. Instead of calling itself General Electric, I urged it to change its name to General Fleecing. If the bulk of its tax-free profits stemmed from Navy contracts, so much the better -- it could be called Admiral Fleecing, which the public, after a little tax-deductible spending by the public relations department, could surely be induced to think of as ''Admirable Fleecing.''